A COMPASS ON THE NAVIGABLE SEA

An overstuffed literary anthology drawn from the pages of two journals out of the University of Oklahoma.

The title comes from Octavio Paz, one of hundreds of writers published since 1927 by the literary journals Books Abroad and its successor, World Literature Today. The occasion of Paz’s sonorous phrase honors the parent publication, which he likened, on receiving its Neustadt Prize, to a compass that guided him to writers he would likely never have discovered; further, Paz pays homage to the plurality and universality that literature embraces in “acknowledging…the admirable diversity of man and his works.” This is a diverse gathering, to be sure, containing work by classic authors (Musil, Neruda, Mann) and modern epigone (Lahiri, Gurnah, Hamid) in celebration of language, books, and literature. Some of the pieces, particularly the “first takes” on classic works, are too short and sometimes slight to carry much weight: likening The Savage Detectives in passing to One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, says little about either Bolaño or García Márquez. Fortunately, much else is meatier: a splendid poem by Czeslaw Milosz (“Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot”) here, a thoughtful consideration of translation and cultural translocation by Mojave writer Natalie Diaz (“It is a gift to have a language that English is too small for, since I have a life that English thinks is small”) there; Margarita Engle’s insistence that, our freedoms of thought and writing being muscles, “if we don’t use them, they will atrophy, and we won’t be able to defend children against tyranny” buttressing Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare’s view that belief in literature means knowing that “the government which dominates you…[and] tyranny itself are a passing nightmare, dead matter, compared to the great order of which you have become initiated as a member.” And there it is: literature as news that stays news, that because timeless couldn’t be more timely.

A mixed bag, but with many insights and small pleasures.